User Observation and Analysis
Problem Statement
Parents of school-aged children have to shuttle their children to school and activities. Carpooling would reduce the burden, but parents often face difficulty in creating carpooling arrangements due to not knowing who would be a suitable partner and social awkwardness. Even once a carpooling arrangement is made, parents have difficulty keeping track of when their turns are, the various destinations, and ensuring an equitable split of the driving. Parents desire an easy, economically effective, and safe solution to ameliorate the amount of time spent driving their children to their activities.
Observation & Interviews
- Referred to as Jane
Jane is a single mother who is twenty five years old. She has two children who are ages 7 and 5 respectively. Jane is not very proficient with computers; she states she is able to maintain her Facebook account, but struggles to use applications as advanced as Microsoft Office. Her children are starting to become very active in activities such as karate, school, soccer, and piano lessons. She works at a full-time job and struggles to have time to get her children to the activities they enjoy while providing for them as well.
Because of her busy lifestyle, she has difficulty having time to meet other parents in these respective activities. She knows that there is a regular group of children near her home who go to the same activities, but she has difficulty reaching out to them with the idea of carpooling. When she does find, groups she wants to split the time evenly between the group to allow her to save as much time as possible to focus on her job. She also mentioned that carpooling groups she has been a part of change frequently as children are not always able to attend certain things because of family funtions or the like. After noticing this, she states that having a set schedule of drivers on a rotation while having the flexibility to make changes along with a fair and balanced system for sharing the driving load. This is important to her because saving money as a single mother was very important to her. Jane's other primary concern was safety because she is not able to be there at all times while her children are being transported. She likes to know where her kids are at all times and would like to have the ability to contact the driver at all times.
The most interesting comments she made about her goals while carpooling was that it is very difficult to keep track of which children are going where and when they are going. Managing her, her children's, and other children's schedules has been a daunting task for her and stated that this is a problem that is very much worth addressing.
User Classes
1. Parents Reaching Out to Others
- Non-native English speakers who are not socially confident
- Have children who are not social, i.e. do not meet many other children
2. Time Saving Parents
- Lead busy lifestyles that do not leave extra time to organize carpools
- Desire stress alleviation from managing many different schedules
- Need a fair distribution of driving time to maximize their time not carpooling
3. Money Saving Parents
- Need a fair distribution of driving amount to maximize their savings from carpooling
- If others are willing to drive more often, they would prefer that they do
Needs & Goals
- Make it easy for the driver to know the locations that he or she has to go to
- Easy to add or remove people when the group changes
- Easy to find new people to carpool with (Facilitate the initial conversation)
- Reminders for when you are responsible for doing the pick ups and when others are picking up your kids
- Safety
- Save money, time, and possibly make new friends